Regularity and energy transfer for a nonlinear beam equation

Abstract In this paper we study some key effects of a discontinuous forcing term in a fourth order wave equation on a bounded domain, modeling the adhesion of an elastic beam with a substrate through an elastic-breakable interaction. By using a spectral decomposition method we show that the main effects induced by the nonlinearity at the transition from attached to detached states can be traced in a loss of regularity of the solution and in a migration of the total energy through the scales.